art ed digested

Our fourth grade students have been hard at work on their Artist-Inspired Masks, and are nearing the final stage of adding mixed media to the painted surfaces.

I am ecstatic with the range of ideas being expressed, and the thought process students are using! There will be exciting surprises once students bring in their additional materials from home to add texture and meaning.

Check out all of the masks here!

I’ve also set up a new ArtEdDigested wiki to collaborate on lesson planning with my colleagues here at Kingsley Montessori School, and hopefully my new educator friends that I am meeting here on Edublogs and in the Twitterverse. Ah, technology, I love you.

We have just completed our Hundertwasser Illuminated Landscape project, in which students abstracted the forms of a landscape drawing to warp and twist it into something dream-like and surreal. They then applied their knowledge of color theory to working the drawing in oil pastels, finally using gold paint to add small areas of emphasis.

I love introducing Hundertwasser to students who have never seen his work before.  Without fail there are awed “ooohs” and “ahhhhs” throughout the room.  These oil pastels, however, give me the same emotion.

I love looking at these, the combination of saturated color, black background and gold highlights is so rich!

For full sized images, check out the flickr gallery.

And now, as promised, some wonderful paintings by my first graders:

Our first day back from a two-week long Spring Break, and the first lesson I pull out of my hat with the first graders is a smashing success!

I discussed Kandinsky, abstract art, color theory and composition, then let them go straight to a canvas with fine-tipped sharpies.  After they had put down some designs in black, we painted an underpainting in watercolors, being careful to keep the colors saturated and bright, inspired by the patches of color used by Kandinsky.

Next week, we’ll try some gradations in semi-opaque acrylics and I’ll post some examples!

Feeling industrious, I opted to read the latest issue of Art Education journal on my commute today, rather than the most excellent fiction I’ve been reading lately, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I was struck in a very personal way by:

Taking The 40/40 Challenge: Sixteen Painters Working Daily To Develop a Painting Discipline
by Camilla McComb

McComb chronicled the mental struggle when asked by her students, “Ms. McComb, do you paint every day?” A simple question at face value, but if I were asked the same question, it would churn up quite a bit of guilt and also a good deal of ambition.

Art teachers are asked to wear many hats. In my mind, we need to be foremost an educator, in order to effectively manage, teach and inspire students. Second, we must have a mastery of subject matter, very rarely do I consider the artwork created in my free time part of my career.
This hierarchy seems to have served me well thus far, but after reading that McComb considered this behavior in herself to be “perpetuating artistic fraud,” I had to do some soul searching and ask hard questions of myself.

In Camilla McComb’s case, she joined her students in a 40/40 Challenge, which was 40 paintings in 40 days, painting for one hour each night. Clearing the time, and the mind for an hour of painting nightly seems a monumental task in the busy, overstimulated “leisure time” of 2006.

I admire McComb for her ability to look honestly at herself and the work habits of her students while joining them in an endeavor to actively change how they create. I would love to see how the challenge would change if it became 40 sketches in 40 nights.

In my own art education, I did not experience oil painting until my senior year. Even then, I was in an advanced placement course.

One of my great loves is still oil painting, the saturation of the colors, the depth of tone, the smell, and the forgiveness the long drying time affords.

Considering that many of my future and past students may never become acquainted with the wonders of oil paint, I thought it best to try to love acrylics, which domintate art classroom supply closets.

Here is the first of my recent studies. Acrylics are tricky, and to coax them to obey, you need to work quickly or find a medium to bend them to your will.

This excercise reminds me yet again that students are constantly provided with materials that are unfamiliar and equally unforgiving to the learning process. So my advice to the art teachers of the world for the Summer is, take your least favorite medium - and fall in love with it.

As for acrylics, I’m still learning to love.